Friday, 24 June 2016

In
my entire research life, the biggest ever thrill took place in Queen’s
University Belfast a month ago. Preparing for an excellent Dublin conference this
week marking the centenary of the Easter Uprising in 1916, I dived into the archived
papers of my inspirational new hero, Professor Robert (“Bob”) Mitchell Henry (1873-1950).
He has never received due recognition as a role model for academics, so here is
my belated appreciation.

A
fine classical scholar, Bob was the pillar of Queen’s for nearly three decades
and led its extra-mural activities. He co-founded the local branch of the
Workers’ Educational Association and the Classical Association of Ireland. He
lectured to the Ulster working class on ancient women and slaves. He was the first President of the Society for Irish
Historical Studies. He learned and taught Gaelic. He wrote in socialist
newspapers. He energetically supported
Trade Unions, the poor, and the Belfast Newsboys Club.

Queen's University Belfast

But
Bob was also a republican and a tireless supporter of Irish Catholics and of Irish unity. This
is all the more surprising since he was a devout Protestant of Scottish
descent. Alongside books on Latin literature, he wrote the canonical Evolution of Sinn Fein (1920), a
meticulously researched and sympathetic account of the background to the 1916
rebellion and the principles which motivated the rebels.

'Shooting range'--entry in Henry's diary March 1916

Several
passages in this exquisitely written tragic history made me suspect that he had
himself joined the Irish Volunteers. They were riflemen prepared to fight the
pro-British Ulster Volunteers and if necessary die in defence of Irish
independence and unity. So I consulted his pocket diaries. Rifle practice is indeed
a regular feature, but only of the months January to March 1916.

Many
of the Irish Volunteers were rounded up, imprisoned and deported after the uprising.
Thirteen of the rebel leaders were summarily executed after hasty court-martials.
Bob was undoubtedly in personal danger at the time.

The Executed 1916 Leaders

After
the executions he prudently decided to promote pan-Irish independence through writing rather than revolution. I wonder what he would have
made of today’s referendum result, in which the people of the north of Ireland emphatically
voted in favour of remaining in Europe alongside the other Irish people sharing
their lovely island.

If
Sinn Fein get their way, a century on from the Easter uprising the people of Northern
Ireland may finally decide that being dragged out of the EU is too high a price
to pay for being subjects of the English crown. Ireland has had intimate cultural links with Europe since early medieval times. I wish I could have this conversation with Bob. It would provide some solace today.

Saturday, 18 June 2016

The
Latin poet Horace said that the Britons were hostile towards strangers (Britannos hospitibus feros, Ode 3.4).
Yesterday, reeling like everyone else from the appalling murder of Labour MP, and true friend of all immigrants, Jo Cox, I had to intervene on a bus between
Oxford and London because the yobbish white driver was being so hostile to a
foreign lady.

She
only had one of the new £20 notes, for a £14 fare. Neither she nor anyone
else could see whether his problem was with the unfamiliarity of the note or
her lack of the right change. He accused her, loudly, of wasting his time and
being too stupid to understand English. At this point a male passenger shouted
at him, legitimately enough, ‘What sort
of impression of our country do you think you are making on this lady?’ A
brawl was imminent. I got up and paid for the lady with my multi-use ten-journey
card. She thanked me politely. We set off.

Like
‘homophobia’ as a euphemism for lethal hatred of gay people, the word xenophobia is not enough to describe
that bus driver. It means fear of
strangers. We need a word meaning hatred of strangers, which would be misoxeny, a word my twitter friend Graham Guest points out to me was in use in the 17th century. John Josselyn said that ‘the old Brittains’ were notable for their ‘misoxenie
or hatred to strangers.’ Cartographer John Speed wrote, presciently, that misoxenie was unalterably
inherent in the ‘common humour’ of our ‘Nation’.

Inter-Marriage as Foundation Myth of Marseilles

Watching
my compatriots slugging it out in Marseilles with the equally misoxenic Russian
football ‘fans’ last week was excruciatingly embarrassing. I yelled at the TV that they were betraying
the spirit of Marseilles, founded as Massalia by Greek vintners in about
600 BCE. A French princess named Gyptis fell in love with a Protis, a handsome Greek.
The Gauls had welcomed him to a feast.
She chose the migrant as her husband rather than any of her Gallic suitors.

The
incident with the bus driver made me feel even worse than the Marseilles football shambles. How I’m going to feel next Friday morning if misoxeny prevails, and we
Britons hospitibus feri decide to turn
our backs on the rest of Europe, does not bear thinking about. If I don’t blog
next weekend it will be because I have fled the country altogether, perhaps to Marseilles, portrayed here as an idyllic hybrid ancient community by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Saturday, 11 June 2016

This is me at 0930 on Friday morning in
Patras, due to kick off a pioneering international conference on Classical Reception and the Human with a
lecture at 1400. I have always hated mosquitoes since my friend Caroline
Fraser, a fine physicist, died at 40 of undiagnosed malaria after visiting
South Africa. The Zika virus is doing nothing to rehabilitate them in my eyes.

Dual Purpose Ancient Egyptian Netting

Mosquitoes have never liked me, or
perhaps liked me too much, but this was
ridiculous. The irony was that one part of my paper was about how humans should treat animals with respect. Aristotle refers to the extinction of a species of scallop ‘partly
by the dredging-machine used in their capture’. I would happily have dredged up and annihilated every mosquito in Greece.

Mosquitoes and Murder Fantasies

Herodotus tells how clever Egyptians
defy mosquitoes by wrapping themselves at night in the fine-gauged nets with
which they catch fish by day. But ancient Greek references to mosquitoes often
occur in sinister contexts. Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, taking years to figure out how to kill her husband because he had killed their daughter, describes with double meaning how ‘lightly
whirring mosquitoes whizz around’ and constantly waken her from dreams in which
she imagines him suffering.

"Better the (full) mosquito that you know"

One story in Aesop emphasises the ‘jungle
law’ that is so important to the cynical world view of the ancient fable: a
mosquito defeats a great lion by repeatedly biting his face, but is then
himself entrapped by a spider. Another Aesopic fable discourages anybody to opt
for a change of master or government. A fox whose tail looked like my face
yesterday morning still declined the offer to have the mosquitoes driven away.
He reasoned that full mosquitoes could hurt him less than the hungry new ones
which would inevitably come and victimise him.

Feeling like Aesop’s suppurating lion
and fox, I had to confess the problem to the conference organiser Efimia
Karakantza. She is an extraordinary woman, with a team of inspirational
students. No Greek economic crisis or slashing cut to university funding has
stopped them, so why should a trifling mosquito bite?

Edith, Efimia and Marietta

These wonderful young Greeks include
Marietta Kotsafti, who calmly drove us to a hospital. Despite the obvious shortage of
resources, I was treated for free with speed, humour, and kindness. Efimia
could have done without the excitement, especially when she broke her own
glasses. Like the Graiai, there was now only one sighted person in three.

But a huge injection in my rear and by 1400 I could
see enough to paste eye shadow all over the swelling and give my paper. I’m
coming back in September, but this time with an armoury of mosquito-targetted
chemical weapons, syringes full of antihistamines and an Egyptian fishing net.
KOUNOUPIA OF PATRAS, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Sunday, 5 June 2016

Two
hundred years ago this week the British House of Commons voted to buy the
exquisite sculptures, which Lord Elgin’s workmen had in 1803 crowbarred from the Parthenon,
for the sum of £35,000 (£2.4 million in today’s money). I personally prefer to call them 'sculptures': 'marbles' does not convey the phenomenal amount of work which went into their production.

The Same Block post-crowbar

The parliamentary debate on June 7th 1816 was tempestuous. A famine meant starvation for many British poor. But Lord Castlereagh, Tory Leader of the House of Commons, in
triumphalist mood after Waterloo, was determined to use the incalculable
symbolic value of the sculptures (despite the damage which the crowbarring had inflicted) in the cause of British national pride. He wanted to spend as much
again on a British Museum in which to house them.

Peter Moore

A
forgotten hero of the debate was Peter Moore, vicar’s son and radical Whig M.P.
for Coventry. He announced that he was making a counter-claim for this apparently
available cash on behalf of his hungry constituents.

Cruikshank Satirises Purchase when many Britons were starving

In this cartoon, Castlereagh
says to John Bull, ‘Here's a Bargain for you Johnny! Only £35.000!! I have
bought them on purpose for you! Never think of Bread when you can have Stones
so wonderous Cheap!!’ John Bull’s emaciated children retort, ‘Don't buy them Daddy!
we don't want Stones. Give us Bread! Give us Bread! Give us Bread!’

Eddie O'Hara: RIP

Last
week Eddie O’Hara died. He was the inspiring Chairman of the British Committee for the
Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, of which I am a member. It is heartbreaking
for his family. It is awful that he was deprived of the opportunity this
week offers for public debate about the issue so close to his heart. His death
is a cruel blow to the cause.

Eddie O’Hara was a working-class boy from Bootle. He got to Magdalen College, Oxford,
to study Classics, in the days when such upward mobility was still made possible
by Direct and Student Maintenance Grants. He served for twenty years as Labour MP for
Knowsley South. He was passionate, principled, energetic, and will be difficult to replace.

If
you live in Britain, or are a Briton abroad sympathetic to the campaign to reunite
the Parthenon sculptures in the city where they were created, you can find out
more about how to help the BCRPM here, for example by
writing to your MP.

I
am about to do this, again. I will point out that since most Britons had no
vote in 1816, the purchase of the sculptures had no democratic mandate. I will
also suggest that the current Lord Elgin donate the £2.4 million his family extracted from the British taxpayer, in exchange for sculptures expropriated from the residents of Athens, to a poverty
charity or pressure organisation such as the Child Poverty Action Group. The children
of Coventry, one
third of whom live below the poverty line, would be a good place to start.